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I am sure you have been analyzing the keywords the search engines have used to send searchers to your site.

If you are starting a keyword report, the search keywords in ex. Google Analytics are a great place to find keywords for your seed keyword list or if you already have a keyword list, you can supplement it with keywords the search engines already find your site relevant for.

Your main problem is that Google Analytics have made it difficult to download the search keywords, but you don’t need to worry, because I will explain how it is done step by step.

Step by step how you download the search keywords from Analytics
You find the keywords by navigation to “Traffic Sources” and then “Organic”

Before you start downloading you need to have a look at 4 settings.

Data Range
In the top right corner you can adjust the period you want to retrieve the keywords from. I use as long period as I can get if I don’t have any good reasons not to.
A good reason could be that you have downloaded the whole period before and now you want to update your list with new keywords so you choose from the end date of last download to now.

Paid or non-paid keywords?
I only download the non-paid keywords, because I use a feature in the keyword tool to download the keywords from Adwords in an organized form. Usually the paid keywords are well organized and therefore it is easier to keep them that way. You find the paid keywords in the navigation under the organic.

Filter KeywordMost of the time I never filter anything, but if you know that your site is getting traffic for a keyword that isn’t your target, you have the option to filter it her. There are many options, but to filter an unwanted keyword you choose “exclude” in the drop down menu, write the word in the box and hit go…

Download 500 keywordIf you are downloading 1.000.000 keywords for a big site it makes a big different if you are download 10 or 500 keywords every time. Therefore it can save you lots of time to ask Analytics to show 500 keywords, because then you will also download 500 keywords each time.

Downloading and making one big list First you need to download all the keywords in a spread sheets with 500 keywords in each and then transfer them to one big list.

After you ask Analytics to show 500 rows go to the top and click at “Export” and then “TSV for Excel”. You should now download the first spread sheet. Don’t open the spread sheets before you are finish downloading all the keywords.

Now move down to the bottom right corner and click the right arrow to get the next 500 keywords. Move up and export them again. Continue like this until you are finish.

Open all the spread sheets or as many as your computer can handle. Move down and mark A8, hold down Shift, Ctrl and press arrow down (so you mark all the keywords without scrolling), copy the keywords and close the spread sheet. Open Notepad (or another text editor) and paste the keywords in there.

Repeat until there are no more spread sheets left.

Congratulation, you now have a list of keywords used to find your site.

You now have two tasks left. The search engines aren’t perfect, so most likely you have been found for keywords that aren’t relevant for your site. It makes no sense to keep working with these irrelevant keywords and therefore we recommend that you use our free keyword tool to sort the keywords.

If you have a big website or are using Adwords you probably have to separate the keywords into different categories. You can use our free keyword splitter for that.

I hope you enjoy the how to article?

Please let us know if you use an easier method to download your keywords from Analytics or have any problems!